Residents question lynx proposal

But, and there is a big but, she feels there is a huge bank of questions that proposers Lynx UK Trust simply hasn’t answered.

“The assertion made at the outset of the meeting (in Tarset) by a member of Lynx UK was that ‘we might as well accept the situation because it’s going to happen anyway’, or words to that effect,” she said.

“I came away feeling that, with one notable exception, the panel were of the opinion that the residents’ justifiable concerns could be summarily dismissed and that we are simply being obstructive for no reason.

“That is despite the fact the local people are the ones who will be most involved with and directly affected by such a scheme – whether positively or negatively. As such, their concerns need to be addressed properly.”

First and foremost was the question how Lynx UK had come to announce its proposal before it had even carried out a feasibility study.

The research for that is now being carried out, for inclusion in the application due to be submitted to Natural England for a licence to release six wild lynx in Kielder Forest in a five-year trial.

From the credibility of the tourist-spend forecast to the management and, indeed, wellbeing of the lynx themselves, Sarah has questions.

“How has the trust come up with its figure for the income it says the lynx will generate – £68m per annum nationally and £6m per annum for Kielder?

“The figures were simply stated (at the Tarset meeting) with no analysis, reference or background being provided, and just the vague mention of ‘lynx tourism’ and the opportunities for ‘local businesses to sell T-shirts and mugs, etc.’”

She is worried about the accuracy of the research it is carrying out too, not least because it has engaged a company that doesn’t appear to know the local terrain to do the feasibility modelling.

“The trust stated that the company has far greater expertise than the Forestry Commission, whose staff know the land like the back of their hands!” she said.

“Lynx UK also said there was no need for a true ground-based study, as the company could ‘look on Google and determine the position of each and every tree’.

“However, the Forestry Commission knows not just the location of every tree, but the species of moss, lichen and bird growing on and around them.”

What safeguards would be put in place to protect the surrounding farms and estates if, say, the lynx’s food of choice, the roe deer, moved and the lynx followed?

What would happen if they did start to take lambs, sheep and calves, as farmers feared they would?

Indeed, what control and monitoring would be put in place overall?

And when the lynx bred and the population reached the maximum sustainable in Kielder Forest, who would pay for the capture and relocation of the surplus?

The effect on the existing forest wildlife worries her too. “How would vulnerable species such as the red squirrel, the newly-reintroduced water vole population and the ground-nesting birds at the forest margins be protected?” she asked. “Water vole would be snack-size for a lynx.

“The trust has stated lynx would keep foxes in check, thus protecting ground-nesting birds, but game birds and ground-nesting birds are listed among the lynx’s prey and a predator will always take easy prey if it’s available.”

Trudi Macgregor, of The Sneep, Tarset, objects to the artificial divisions being created during Lynx UK’s consultation. The feedback gleaned is being entered under three headings: residents, businesses and farmers.

But this is one strong, local community in which the farms are businesses too and the farmers their neighbours and friends.

She said: “The point I want to drive home is that the lynx is not a threatened species, but British hill farmers are!

“The local community is concerned about the way Lynx UK appears to be trying to portray local farmers as a vociferous minority which can be sidelined, while, in fact, they enjoy wide community support in their concerns about their animals.

“As a community, we all care about the environment, otherwise we wouldn’t live here.”

The overriding objection to the proposal was the threat it posed to farming, the area’s key economic activity. Farmers were already struggling under economic pressures likely to worsen after Brexit, so the case for placing an additional burden on them would have to be a very good one.

“We believe the trust is making misleading claims about the level of public support for their proposal,” she said.

“They might hope by doing this to give weight to their future application for a licence to implement it.”

In one public statement, the trust asserted ‘a survey of the UK public found that 91 per cent would support the proposal’.

But the local meetings and a petition currently doing the rounds, claiming the trust had not proven its case in relation to the economic and environmental benefits of the proposal, demonstrated this certainly wasn’t true in Kielder and Tarset.

Here, the figures are pretty evenly split between yes, no and don’t know.

“We questioned the neutrality of the trust’s own local consultation and the presentation of its results,” said Trudi.

“People were not asked on the consultation form simply whether they were in favour or not. Instead, the trust used its own subjective assessment of people’s responses to more wide-ranging questions to determine the answer.

“The subsequent interpretation of the results was therefore open to being skewed by Lynx UK’s own passion for the cause.”

The trust admitted the lynx was not a threatened species, so this was not about species protection, she said, though the public might mistakenly think it was.

Andrew Ions, farmer at High Thorneyburn, Tarset

Andrew’s family has farmed the 1200 acres, surrounded on three sides by Kielder Forest, since 1948. The family has 700 sheep and 100 cows.

“Farmers manage and maintain the landscape and the majority of us here are in the higher level environment scheme, so we have a duty to maintain the upland areas,” he said.

“Yet they try to portray us as if we are somehow detached and don’t care about the environment we love and care for.”

Because Kielder Forest was predominantly densely-packed sitka spruce and the only place there was any biodiversity was at the edges, lynx would follow the foraging roe deer.

“All the deer in my patch breed on my meadow land, so that would bring the lynx into very close proximity to my ewes and lambs,” he said.

“They say lynx will have an impact on foxes, but only on around six per cent of the fox population, so it is negligible. No, the threat is to my sheep.”

As for the promised compensation scheme, farmers would have great difficulty proving a lynx was responsible for any deaths unless they could find the carcass, and they would not be compensated for what could be hours of their time searching for it.

“Paul O’Donoghue (Lynx UK’s chief scientific officer) told me they would look on the GPS-locators (tracking the lynx) and if they were more than five miles away, we wouldn’t be compensated,” he said.

“But this is an animal that can roam 50 or 60 miles on a night time – a male lynx can have a terrain 800 kilometres square.”

While farmers had the legal right to shoot a dog worrying sheep, the lynx would be a protected species and they would probably move too fast to shoot anyway.

He said: “They talk about a five-year trial, but there is no indication what they will deem a successful trial.

“I personally believe that for the wider Kielder area, this will be the equivalent of the reintroduction of sea eagles in Scotland, where quite a few sheep farmers have seen their stock decimated.”

Anne Monroe, of Greystead Holiday Cottages, Tarset

Anne and husband, Bill, opened their first holiday let in 2004 and they are about to open their third. Last year, they had almost 7000 bed nights booked.

“As a resident, I’m deeply upset about this and so is my husband,” she said.

“We think the threat to livestock is very serious and has not been thought through by Lynx UK – we’re totally against the proposal.

“The farmers are our neighbours and friends and this is a close-knit community, which is why so many of us want to live here. What affects one, affects us all.”

The Monroes’ guests came to the area for quiet recreation – for walking, cycling, birdwatching and sailing. They were not thrill-seekers who would come in the hope of spotting an elusive lynx, Loch Ness monster-style.

The majority of them also came with dogs, and she wondered how a meeting between dog and lynx would go.

“I think this proposal would be counter-productive as far as my visitors are concerned,” she said.

“All these benefits to tourism they are quoting, well, I just don’t think there’s the tourism infrastructure here to cope for a bigger influx and if it was upgraded for bigger numbers, the type of people coming now probably wouldn’t want to come anymore.

“The tourism market at the moment is a perfect fit for all the wonderful activities available in Kielder Water and Forest Park, so why tip it out of balance?”

Gillian Liddle, of Greenhaugh

With a husband and step-son both self-employed in the local forestry industry, Gillian came along to present the family’s views on the possible reintroduction of lynx into their heartland.

“Kielder is not a vast space and it’s a man-made space at that,” she said.

“A lot of the forest has been planted with precision and these animals are basically cats, so there needs to be more research done about what sort of damage they will do to the trees and the other animals that already live there.

“We have wild goats and wild orchids and other protected species such as the red squirrel – what will happen to them?”

How would these wild lynx be contained in a woodland area that was actually too small for them and their roaming instincts?

And why reintroduce a species that died out in Britain in the early 700s?

“There was a reason they were made extinct,” she said, “so why reintroduce them into an environment that doesn’t really need them anymore?”

She also wanted to know where the money was coming from to pay for the project, and pointed out it would be better spent on improving local services.

“Will Lynx UK be paying for this themselves? Because I don’t want my taxpayer’s money going on supporting lynx!”

Kate Hersey, co-owner of the Unison Colour soft pastels and member of Tarset Archive Group

“This whole thing has been slightly divisive in my family,” she said. “While I’m against it, my son Robert, who owns the Wild Northumbrian Tipis & Yurts business, is keen on the idea.

“Having said that, not many people in this area are pro-lynx.

“I think the way the whole thing has been introduced and the way they (Lynx UK) have treated us all is quite shocking.”

Unlike quite a few of the people who spoke to the Courant, she had actually received a visit from Lynx UK that was part and parcel of the consultation.

She said: “They were perfectly polite and nice, but they didn’t really listen and that is the whole thing – they are not listening! They are completely determined to tramp through our community.

“They have just come in, all guns blazing, and said ‘you just have to accept this’.

“Sixty to 70 people were at the last meeting and only about two per cent were supportive of the idea.”

She was worried about an adverse impact on the existing, often protected wildlife, on the quiet and tranquil nature of the existing tourism and, more than anything, on local farmers.

“We are one community!” she said.

Bill & Pauline King, owners of Eals Lodge B&B in Tarset

Of the 66 ratings the couple have notched up on Trip Advisor so far, 63 of them record five-star excellence. “So we have validity,” said Bill.

So when they say their guests, who are mostly over the age of 40, are attracted by the Kielder that is already there, they know what they are talking about.

He said: “We have people who have been coming to Kielder for 20 years off and on and have never seen a red squirrel or a deer, so what makes you think the lynx, which is more shy and lives deeper in the forest, will be an attraction?”

But if it was, the area’s infrastructure couldn’t cater for the increase in tourism forecast anyway. “I think there are about seven accommodation providers from Kielder to Greenhaugh,” he said.

“They are talking about an extra tourism spend of millions, but if we just have three rooms and are already busy, how do we absorb the extra? “It’s false optimism.”

Marilyn Walton, of Burnbank Farm, Greenhaugh

While she is a farmer, Marilyn is actually most worried about what the effect on wildlife would be.

“I work outside all the time, so I know where the wildlife is,” she said. “We have 10 hay fields and a doe comes into just about every one of them to have a fawn in the spring and they stay there until the hay is cut.

“They are lovely to see and tourists can see them from the road, but we also abut the forest, so what’s to stop the lynx following them out of the trees?

“There is a closed season to allow deer to have their fawns, so why would they allow lynx to be dropped in as a predator?”

The Kielder area was already ‘predator-heavy’, due in no small part to the explosion in the protected badger population.

“We’re in the higher stewardship scheme, but we’re getting less ground-nesting birds because badgers eat the eggs, when we should be getting more,” she said.

Her family didn’t allow shooting on their farm, not even when it came to foxes, because nature had a habit of righting its own balance.

Paul Walton, resident of West Burnbanks, Tarset

After reading Lynx UK’s claim that most people were in favour of the lynx being reintroduced, Paul began his own survey-cum-petition.

“It wasn’t the impression I’d got!” he said. “So I’ve been going round for the past few weeks talking to people, and of the 125 houses lived in in the parish of Tarset & Greystead, I have visited 75 so far.

“Of those, 74 have said no, they are against it.”

This wasn’t an online survey that lacked transparency, he added. Rather, it was people putting their name to a petition in person.

They had a range of reasons, not least the waste of resources that would be better spent supporting existing wildlife programmes.

But the lack of a big enough terrain for the lynx and the feared impact on farmers were top of the list.

Jan Ashdown, member of Tarset Archive Group

Jan questioned why the cart had been put before the horse: “What is the value of the feasibility study that is only just being done now?

“They are just setting out to prove the case for what they say is going to happen anyway.”

What worried her was the lustre this proposal seemed to be giving the wider re-wilding movement. “Re-wilding this is not!” she said. “Because that is a hugely complex issue that has to take into account the current suitability and land use that has developed over hundreds of years, whether you think that land use is right or not.

“You can’t just come in and say ‘this is all wrong, farmers are all wrong, we’re going to change it’.

“You have to work out what you have and improve that. There is a huge number of agri-environment schemes up here and therefore considerable efforts already being made to improve the environment.”

But the bottom line was, just what ecosystem were Lynx Trust UK aiming to restore in Kielder?

There had been little in these wet, acidic lands before the man-made forest began to be planted a century ago, and trees were still the only things that really grew.

Jan said: “My last question to Lynx UK is ‘if you are serious about ecology, why go for such a conspicuously advertising species such as the lynx, when you could introduce insects and all sorts of other species that would genuinely improve the ecological chain?’”